Life is Art

Sorry, can't figure out how to attach code or my presentation! I don't really know how github works but I'll try to set up something soon. Come talk to me for demonstrations.

Inspiration

We want to turn motions into music. Everyday motions can become art; a piece of music can represent someone's daily life. This concept can be used for music education in underprivileged schools, a way to turn sign language into an auditory signal, an alternative medium to social media to share our lives in an artistic representation, or a way to make composing music accessible to anyone. Art and motions are fundamental to our lives, and the applications of the concept of turning motions into art are endless.

What it does

So far we've developed a way to convert motion data from a Myo wristband into chords. So far it has the features that the accelerometer data controls pitches, and the EMG data controls pitch duration. This allows large ranges of motion to create music with a wide pitch range, and allows for motions where the hand is squeezed to output faster, more intense music.

How we built it

We used a Myo wristband to obtain motion data, and manipulated the data in Mathematica to get musical outputs.

Challenges we ran into

1. The Myo wristband outputs a lot of data, but it's also quite noisy-- we smoothed the data by using moving averages.
2. We had to build a way to map accelerometer data to pitches. At first, we mapped data to frequencies, but this resulted in sound frequencies that weren't actually notes, so we had to figure out a way to map to specific note frequencies to actually make music.
3. We have so many more ideas we want to try, and not nearly enough time to realize all of them!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we got code working to turn motions into sound. We've shown that it's definitely possible, and with more work, it can become a great tool.

What we learned

We had an amazing experience, and learned that there's so much you can do with some data manipulation. Life is art!

What's next for Life is Art

We have not yet used the orientation or gyro data given by the Myo wristband. We can use this data to add more musical elements to make the music we have so far more aesthetically pleasing. We would like to add features where the wristband can recognize specific movements so that we can make music in real time. We would also like to try having people wearing the Myo wristbands over periods of weeks, so we can see interesting repetitions and the unique motions in peoples lives, which would make for great music. Implementing this concept for specific purposes such as education or for medical applications would require more work into being able to recognize specific motion signals.

Built With

• mathematica
• myo-wristbands